The Kobayashi Online team had a great time over the weekend at PodCamp Toronto, an annual “unconference” that brings together some of the city’s brightest minds in new media. Along with the other interactive sessions, we were especially excited to have our own Andy McIlwain present one of the stellar opening sessions. In this blog post, I’m going to recap some ideas that stood out in my mind from PodCamp both from the sessions and impromptu conversations. 1. Automating your…
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Around the Office: QR Codes; Strategizing Facebook Graph Search; Opera’s Next Act, & More!
Around the Office is a weekly group blog of what the Kobayashi Online team has found interesting, funny, poignant, or otherwise notable over the past week. QR Codes on the Menu Caroline was inspired by the possibilities of QR codes when hearing about a sushi shop wraps their rolls with QR codes. Diners at Britain’s Moshi Moshi can scan their food with their phone for information on the sustainable fish they’re about to eat. We used QR codes to make the products…
Digital Marketing Trend: The Brand Film
Eschewing the restrictions of a slick, 30-second TV spot, brand films have emerged as a tasteful and compelling way to show what a brand is about. In contrast to a more straightforward commercial, a brand film can be thought of as a merging of a filmmaker’s vision and a brand’s core idea. Ideally, it bridges the division between art and commerce to establish a brand’s authenticity. One of the many notable brand films is Un Rendez Vous, which was directed by…
Around the Office: Peeking in on Vine; A Film on Viral Media; Sharing Secretly & More!
Around the Office is a weekly group blog of what the Kobayashi Online team has found interesting, funny, poignant, or otherwise notable over the past week. A Vine Hotline The makers of Twitter have devised a new social app called Vine which applies its predecessor’s length restrictions to mobile video clips. Just as Twitter is limited to 140 character Tweets, Vines are limited to six seconds or less, which many have found to inspire creativity. Andy has been kicking back and watching…
Around the Office: Great Collaborations, Automattic Acquisition, Native Advertising and More!
Around the Office is a weekly group blog of what the Kobayashi Online team has found interesting, funny, poignant, or otherwise notable over the past week. Being a Part of Great Collaborations A lot of people make the mistake of thinking they should take care of every element of a project, when they really would offer greater value to clients through collaboration with other specialists. Our friends (and collaborators) at Finesilver Design + Communications wrote a post on the power of great collaborations.…
Around the Office: I Spy at CES, Hashtag is the Word, A Toronto Symphony & More!
Around the Office is a weekly group blog of what the Kobayashi Online team has found interesting, funny, poignant, or otherwise notable over the past week. Future Spotting at CES We couldn’t help but pay attention to the new gadgetry unveiled at CES. Bored of his light and small phone, David was happy to hear about the new “Phablet” trend, which fuses a tablet and a phone into a device with about 5-inches of screen real estate. Andy dug some some Android…
Around the Office: The Year’s Top Plugins, Input from out of Thin Air, the Value of Mind Share, and More!
Around the Office is a weekly group blog of what the Kobayashi Online team has found interesting, funny, poignant, or otherwise notable over the past week. A Year in 100 WordPress Plugins Andy was interested in seeing where his favourite new WordPress plugins ranked in ManageWP’s top-100 list of free WordPress plugins for 2012. The top plugin was Types, which lets site administrators create and manage custom fields and post types for better site organization. Given the great volume of useful plugins,…
Social Media and Online Marketing Trends for 2012
It seems that social networks and the Internet in general have been playing an increasingly important role in our lives. While the online world hasn’t completely displaced our real-world connections, we certainly rely on it as a way to socialize, follow news and events, shop, find information, and otherwise live digitally. As we said in our year-end review of web design and development trends, we welcome new industry developments but are mindful to take them with a grain of salt.…
Creating an Online Experience for The Real Estate Experience
The Real Estate Expereince combines the knowledge and experience of RE/MAX First Realty Ltd. Brokerage Sales Representatives Elizabeth Haug and Kevin McCullough, who serve Scarborough and communities in the Durham Region (including the Ajax-Pickering area). The website and logo we created showcases the quality of service clients have come to expect from TREE. Project Details therealestateexperience.com website was created using the WordPress Content Management System. The site, which has a private area only for members, includes a dynamic News page that allows editors to create…
Web Design & Development Trends of 2012
As web designers and developers, we trust our core design sensibility to create websites around principles of taste and usability. But we also love seeing new ideas and new current website trends. In this post, we’ll run down some of the web design and development trends we found captivating in 2012. 1. Single-Page Websites Navigating through single page websites is faster than clicking through multiple pages. You can easily browse through text and media by scrolling, sliding, or flicking –…